Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape for good. Buildabrand (@buildabrand) could do just that. The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for your startup for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process. Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customising it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even – eventually – merchandise like pens and beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users. → Read More

Tweetminster has raised £100k from angel investor John Arnold. The news comes just a few weeks after it launched its Livewire, a tracker that aggregates online political activity in the UK, in partnership with The Independent newspaper. Arnold, MD of public affairs agency PoliticsDirect, will join Tweetminster as chairman. Alberto Nardelli, a co-founder of Tweetminster, says the company plans to use the investment to build on its capacity and develop premium analytics and data services around the Livewire. These will be released in the next couple of months. One planned premium service will be a way to use social media tools to survey users around specific political issues – sort of like ‘YouGov 2.0′. Not bad going for something that started life as a side project for a bunch of politics geeks. CrunchBase Information Tweetminster Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Local reviews startup TrustedPlaces has partnered with Northcliffe Media to power the regional newspaper publisher’s experimental hyperlocal web strategy. News of the deal comes six months after its founders stepped back from speculative sales talks to focus on building revenue and cash flow. LocalPeople beta-launched 20 community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods across south-west England yesterday, with a further 30 planned for rollout in the next month. The sites focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 users, and blend Northcliffe’s local news and traditional media assets like classifieds and job ads with TrustedPlaces’ local business directories and social media elements, to create an ad-funded community publishing platform. Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces told me the partnership is big news for the three-year old startup, and takes it a big step closer to profitability. Additionally, with Northcliffe’s established sales channels to rely on for market penetration in regions outside TrustedPlaces’ usual big city stomping grounds, the company is free to focus on the technology and product development. As per the existing TrustedPlaces experience, users can discover, review and recommend businesses in their area, while the value to businesses is a ready-made way to engage with communities around them. There’s a user-generated content aspect to the deal as well, as LocalPeople users will be free to publish stories about their communities – for more on this angle, check out paidContent’s interview with Northcliffe’s director of digital media, Mike Rowley. CrunchBase Information TrustedPlaces Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

If Ariadne Capital is backing virtual worlds, you’ve got to know they’re a safe bet for the future. The well known broker of investment deals has announced it’s adding two UK virtual world companies to its portfolio – NearGlobal and RealLife. Ariadne has in the past advised Skype, Espotting, voice-to-content leader Spinvox, P2P lending and borrowing startup Zopa, and mobile banking and payments service provider, Monitise, which lends confidence in these virtual reality sites being worth a look. NearGlobal builds high fidelity 3D replicas of real cities which form an atmospheric backdrop for shopping, entertainment, social networking and education. As part of the deal, Marc Worth, co-founder of fashion information channel WGSN.com, joins NearGlobal as investor and non-executive chairman. Worth and his brother Julian founded WGSN.com in 1999 using funding secured by Julie Meyer. They sold the company to publishing group Emap for £140m in 2005. Worth sees in NearGlobal a virtual world that looks great, works effortlessly and offers a clear proposition to business, making it easier for fashion and entertainment industries to take it seriously. The first NearGlobal city will be NearLondon, scheduled for a pre-Christmas launch. RealLife is a social networking application which gives school and college leavers a virtual world in which to experiment with possible careers while linking them to recruiters. At launch, users can expect a 3D avatar-driven MMOG also centred on a virtual London. Paul Flanagan, an executive-in-residence at Ariadne Capital since 2004, is launching a private beta of RealLife on Facebook soon, with a full launch scheduled for July. The first career option will be trading, with brokers able to deal on the major global markets via gnuTrade. Successful traders can purchase a range of virtual goods such as villas on the Riviera, fast cars or great clothes to enhance their virtual lifestyles. Julie Meyer, Ariadne’s CEO says the company wasn’t convinced that virtual worlds were an attractive investment opportunity until the emergence of what she terms “Virtual Worlds 2.0″ – where the user experience has a purpose and is driven by a robust business model. This is the fifth funding round that Ariadne Capital has advised on or introduced new investors to successfully in the last six months. CrunchBase Information Ariadne Capital Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

The BBC is getting into truly real-time interactive web apps with a new open source framework called Hemlock, developed by London-based Mint Digital, and available as of today. The Beeb’s Children’s Department has licensed the technology to develop a peer-to-peer card trading game based on its hugely popular mixed reality show BAMZOOKi, which is sort of like Robot Wars meets Knightmare. This (slightly dated) video should elucidate: Adam Khwaja, a producer working across BBC interactive and multiplatform projects with a particular interest in user experience, says the appeal comes from the casual approach to gameplay that Hemlock allows; being able to dive straight into a realtime multiplayer game without having to register or face a steep learning curve. The kids love it, apparently. Mint developed Hemlock to solve a problem they had in developing Football3s, an interactive fantasy football game designed to be played in real-time alongside actual football matches. The problem is that most real-time interactive web experiences are not real-time at all. It’s all simulated, with the front-end site constantly polling the back-end database for changes to the data. Or as one of the Mint team says on the Hemlock blog, “the web’s current top notch technology is like an impatient and really annoying child“. For apps that attract thousands of users, all this interaction becomes very processor-heavy and the application itself is subject to high latency, which  the user experiences as a sluggish or unresponsive app. Hemlock’s approach is to combine Flash and XMPP, the protocol that powers presence notification and real-time communication. It works in a similar way to push email; Hemlock registers a client with the server to receive messages. The server then notifies the client when there is a new message — no polling required. It also means that multiple users can interact with the same data in real-time. The framework paves the way for web applications of a different calibre, making it easier for developers to get started on building cool apps without having to worry about the low-level foundation stuff. Hemlock was soft-launched last week and received with excitement by the web development community. The potential for commercial applications is vast. Game play is obviously a winner; think how much fun Lexulous or any other Facebook app could be if you were playing in real-time, rather than taking asynchronous turns. There’s also a market in educational software, with the potential for collaborative → Read More

Wonga.com, the startup that has started to change the face of short-term lending in the UK, has closed a $22.25m round of funding led by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, with the support of its existing investor, Balderton Capital. Founded by Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, Wonga provides cash advances to UK consumers, helping solve occasional cash flow problems. It’s provided nearly 100,000 flexible cash advances of up to 30 days since it launched eleven months ago. The killer USP is that Wonga is the first consumer finance company to fully automate the lending process, providing a completely online credit solution around the clock. Via a Web interface applicants select exactly how much cash they need, up to £750. They can then determine their own price by then selecting how many days they want the money for. The company’s risk and decision technology means applicants receive an instant answer, and if they’re successful, Wonga deposits cash into their bank account within an hour, at any time of day or night. However, it’s not cheap. Interest on a £100 loan for 10 days costs £1 a day. So including fees, a £100 loan for 10 days would have to be repaid at £115.91. APR is generally more than 2,000pc. The maximum loan is £750 and the maximum term is 30 days. Damelin attributes Wonga’s rapid profitability to its technical innovation and desire to “amaze” its customers. He says Wonga has been built to scale, and plans to expand very rapidly now that the funding is in place. Accel has a track record of backing some of the fastest growth companies of the last two decades, Facebook included, while Greylock Partners is a long-term investor. Between these approaches, we can expect to see rapid development of the service offering, and expansion into global markets. Given the global economic situation and the need for a collective rebooting of the lending models that make the world turn, it’s good to see VCs supporting a disruptive lender that makes no bones about focusing on responsible lending and a sustainable business model. CrunchBase Information Wonga Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

You’d think that with the futuristic and gravity defying creations they spawn, architects would be leading the vanguard of efficient working practices. It turns out they’re still stuck in the 90s, where sharing files and collaborating with partners and clients is done via CD and bike messenger, or – shock! horror! – even printouts sent by post. Tech startup Woobius is trying to solve this problem with its collaboration tool for architects and engineers, built to suit the specialised workflows of the construction industry. To set the scene: your typical building project involves hundreds if not thousands of drawings, depending on the size of the project. Each drawing has multiple revisions and comments from consultants on the project. Multiply this by 15-20 companies involved in a typical building project, and it makes for a pretty big collaboration headache. Woobius is taking on existing tools in this space, such as BIW, Asite and 4projects, which have been criticised for being slow, expensive, hard to use and often introduced only in the construction stages of a project, rather than starting from the design process. The service is centred on two tools: the dropbox, a light-weight inter-company file sharing tool, and the vault, which includes document control functionality. It’s been in beta for a year and has evolved in response to feedback from architects using it on live projects in that time. The business model is a straightforward freemium one; projects are free up to 200MB, and £10/GB/month thereafter. The privately funded startup was founded in 2007 by architect Bob Leung, who designed the product, and technology lead Daniel Tenner. They plan to officially launch and market Woobius now that proof of concept is in place. Given the site’s reported growth through word of mouth alone – from 15 initial users to over 2500 registered users across 100 construction projects in 27 countries – I’d say they’re on to a winner. CrunchBase Information Woobius Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

ITV.com is leaping aboard the social media bandwagon to encourage realtime interaction around this afternoon’s FA Cup final between Everton and Chelsea FCs. The broadcaster has integrated updates from Twitter and our old friends AudioBoo in an FA Cup Buzz microsite. The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES will track which of the players are generating the most chatter on Twitter at any given moment, with sliders for each player showing who’s the most talked about. Fans will also be able to share their armchair commentary (and really bad jokes) using AudioBoo, a service which is rapidly becoming a darling of the mainstream media for making it so easy to transform an audience from passive consumers to active participants. After the match, fans will be able to scrub along a timeline in the thruSITES buzz tracker to see which players caused most response at crucial moments – a sort of crowdsourced, visual post-match highlights package which, from the other perspective, will give the clubs a direct tap into public sentiment around their players. A viewers’ backchannel is not a new thing – just watch the hashtags trend when Britain’s Got Talent or The Apprentice is on. However, this is possibly the first time a British broadcaster has attempted to integrate the backchannel into its online coverage. It’ll be interesting to see if any cross-channel promotion will be in place, i.e. if the TV commentators will direct viewers to contribute to the FA Cup Buzz site. Dominic Cameron, MD of ITV.com, says that if the FA Cup Buzz experiment is a success, the broadcaster will be looking for more “new and interesting ways” to engage football fans. Meanwhile, if all this engagement isn’t enough to slake your ADD-driven thirst for social media sports apps to distract you from the match, you can play along with Football3s, a realtime fantasy football game developed by Mint Digital, which also integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Chatzy. Enjoy the match! CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Best Before Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

UK startup Imagini has launched the private beta version of its VisualDNA Shops widget to help monetise blogs and websites through a unique take on affiliate sales. The widget adds personalised product recommendations to any site, and immediately starts generating detailed demographic, psychographic and behavioural analytics of its visitors. It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse, which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006. VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. At the moment this means visitors can choose from mobile phones, digital cameras and gadgets. The company plans to include a broader range of products from sites like eBay and Shopping.com in the near future. Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went to getting Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept (doing a rather succinct job, too): Anyone can try the concept with a free, limited VisualDNA Shop. There’s a Pro version for $2.99 a month which comes with  advanced analytics that tell site owners what their audience is like — coining titles like ‘funster’, ‘gamer’ and ‘active adventurer’ — and what appeals to them. With the Pro version, site owners can make their own suggestions for new products to be advertised to different types of shopper, and show visitors other sites visited by people with similar preferences. If you want to try it out, TechCrunch Europe has 50 access codes to give away using the invitation code ‘techcruncheuropevisualdnashop’. CrunchBase Information Imagini Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

So, the dust has settled and we can congratulate start-up photo notecard printing company Touchnote on getting their mobile app out the door in a mere 5 weeks, i.e. just in time to have it included in the Ovi launch FAIL. Thanks to the massive teething problems the Ovi store’s experienced today, you can’t yet find Touchnote for Mobile if you search for it, but we’re told this link will take you there directly, eventually. There are four apps available; the free central app, compatible with all Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 and 2 phones, which comes with one free card credit so that users can trial the service. They can then buy extra card credits from the store, like prepaid mobile top-ups. Using the app, people can take a photo or select an existing image from their phone, add a message and the recipient’s address and send it directly from their mobile handset via WiFi or the phone’s mobile data connection. A physical greeting card is then created from the image and sent in the post. Within the UK, these photo cards are normally delivered on the next working day, provided the card is ordered before noon. It’s worth noting that Touchnote for Mobile is the only Ovi Store app that delivers users a tangible product. The launch is a terrific first step into mobile services for the privately-backed startup that will no doubt help expand its user base beyond the “tens of thousands” of visitors they started seeing after  they launched a third-party API in March. Razia Ahamed, Touchnote’s business development and marketing manager, says that step increased web traffic tenfold and led to the present situation which sees 40% of Touchnotes orders come from outside the UK — double what it was two months ago. It also embraces that demographic of users who may feel very comfortable snapping shots on their mobile, but hasn’t yet started using Facebook, Picasa or any other web-based photo sharing service. CrunchBase Information Touchnote Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Mobile content provider AQA 63336 (whose name makes me think of that new emergency services number) has launched AQA2U, a commercial micro-publishing platform which lets UK users micro-blog for money. It works like this: you sign up as a publisher via the AQA website. Once approved, you set up topics ending in 2U which your ‘fans and followers’ subscribe to by texting that topic to 63336, at the cost of 98p. Thereafter, any time you feel like you have something of value to share, you publish it from your phone or online, and your subscribers receive it as a text — at cost to them of 25p per aphorism, observation or other nugget of information. The maximum a user will be charged is £3.50 per month. AQA2U gets 12p of every 25p paid by subscribers and publishers get between 7p and 9p, depending on how many updates they publish each month. If you’re a charity, you get 12p. AQA 63336 says a topic with as few as 25 subscribers can make over £275 per year, with the earnings potential ramping up to almost £3,000 with 250 subscribers. All publishers can choose to donate their earnings to one of the charities which have signed up for the launch; the Samaritans, WellChild and Straight Talking. This strikes me as a model Twitter should have, could have, and possibly may yet adopt when they roll out paid business services. The problem is — and call me cynical — I don’t think that consumers are going to sign up for a paid service if they can get the same information for free elsewhere. So the publishers who are already using Twitter are going to have to decide whether they stick with a service with traction and hope there are monetisation plans in the wings, or try to herd their followers en masse to a newer, relatively less well-known service with limited geographic reach. Having said that, Colly Myers, CEO of AQA says they already know people will pay, based on the “thousands of repetitive texts to AQA 63336 asking the same questions every month”. CrunchBase Information AQA 63336 Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Picli.com, the photo sharing community site which relaunched in March, has just launched a free service to allow users to share photos and video with their Twitter friends. Of course, it’s called Twicli. The service can handle photos, videos, sets and offers a sweet little user experience touch which ‘synchronises’ with the colours and background of your Twitter account – mainly because Picli founders Sam Street and Sean Miller want users to have a seemingly seamless transition from one site to the other. It supports OAuth, an authentication platform which Twitter is encouraging developers to migrate to when developing apps that integrate with the service, as it lets users approve applications acting on their behalf without having to share their password. The Twicli frontpage features the most recent content uploaded by Twitter users. It has its own trending topics view, which is specific to photos and videos, rather than the overall Twitter trends. Users can upload, tag and comment on photos and videos up to 50MB in size. In TwitPic stylee, comments are then broadcast on twitter via the means of @replies. Twitter’s changes to the way users can view @replies will affect this sharing, but Street says Twicli user feedback will determine how they adapt the service to account for this change. Twicli offers a number of refinements around the burgeoning concept of sharing media over Twitter. For example, it supports sets which can mix pics and video, and then send just one tweet sharing the whole set, rather than flooding your tweet stream with individual images. It resizes user photos as they’re uploaded but retains the full resolution version is always available. The service ostensibly targets this feature at bloggers, suggesting that being able to see what image sizes are available makes it easier for them to grab a smaller size if needed — users can assign usage rights for their images or video at the time of uploading.The site was developed over a two week period and still has that new code smell and missing FAQ pages. Minor issues like this aside, Twicli joins the likes of Audioboo as services that encourage immediate multimedia microblogging, without having to return to a computer. The founders hopes Twicli will help mainstream media find relevant user-generated content in a much shorter timeframe — citing the example of the delay of days before the footage of a police officer pushing Ian → Read More

Now here’s something amazing. French telecoms startup Manifone has launched a service that lets you call Skype contacts directly, from any fixed line or mobile phone, with no Skype account, additional software, PC or handset required. They claim their Mani-Sky VoIP service is a first in the telecommunications industry, and by golly, I think they may be right. Mani-Sky assigns alias telephone numbers, which they call ‘direct numbers’, to Skype contacts; these can be saved to your phone memory and called the usual way, at the price of a local call.   The catch is that it’s only the first three minutes of the call that are free. Beyond that, the company’s business model kicks in; anyone wishing to place longer calls can opt for a six-month subscription that offers unlimited calls to Skype for $10. The company makes its money on the parts of the calls that are switched between fixed line and IP networks. Manifone is offering Mani-Sky free to all users in the 11 supported countries in Europe and North America for a promotional period. On the face of it, the service is not all that different from SkypeIn or Jajah.Direct – the primary differentiator is that it opens up Skype, which, let’s face it, is still the market-leading VoIP service, in a way that Skype itself has yet to achieve. CrunchBase Information Manifone Skype Jajah Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

Yahoo’s Open Hack Day London happened this weekend, encouraging the European developer community to get down and dirty with the company’s open strategy platforms. Making use of Yahoo’s now considerable amount of APIs (beautifully rendered in Tube map stylee), the 250+ developers gathered at Congress Centre in Covent Garden and hacked away on a range of projects that ran the gamut from ‘fun but pointless’ to ‘fun and amazingly helpful’ to ‘fun and potentially world-changing’, calling at all stops in between. The judging panel comprised a handful of internet worthies; Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Spotify founder Daniel Ek, Matt Biddulph, CTO of Dopplr; Mozilla Labs’ Pascal Finette; and Tim O’Donoghue, VP engineering at Yahoo Europe and Sophie Major, who heads up Yahoo’s international developer network. Taking a look at the winning hacks, you can get a feel for what these shapers think the internet of the future will look like: as a fundamental principle, it’s open; it’s social, it’s centred around search and it helps the everyday user make sense of their community, their government, their environment and engage in meaningful ways with their friends, neighbours and world around them. A prime example is OpenFreecycle, which won the popular vote as well as the judges’ ‘best of show’ award. OpenFreecycle View more presentations from Premasagar Rose. Developed by Premasagar Rose and Tom Leitch, it uses the information in the Freecycle network, which operates via a series of closed, private Yahoo Groups, to represent more clearly what’s offered or wanted in a particular area. The prototype works for the Leeds group only, but the guys plan to extend it to include other groups, as well as adding alert notifications for particular items, and a Greasemonkey script for shopping sites like eBay or Amazon to let users know when an item similar to the one they’re thinking of buying is available for free in their local community. Here are the winning hacks, all the submitted hacks, plus loads of related video and pics via TweetMeme. [Mike Butcher writes]: Yahoo’s David Filo and senior product management director Cody Simms were also at the event drumming up support for their Open Strategy, announced in April last year. I had a brief chat with Filo at the Friday press conference: Listen! Yahoo’s strategy is all about increasing user engagement across the network, so creating the Y!OS works notionally as an idea, since it creates the → Read More